By Jorge Núñez

In May 2019, a mobile phone video showing two inmates playing football with a decapitated head within an Ecuadorian penitentiary became trending topic on Twitter. Two years later, in February 2021, 79 inmates were killed during a coordinated two-day prison riot staged in three cities. The killings were accompanied with extreme graphic violence in the form of gory mobile phone videos filmed by inmates during the massacres and circulated on social media. Since then, more than 400 inmates have been assassinated in prison riots. As of June 2022, there have been six prison massacres in Ecuador. In one of these massacres, a prisoner broadcasted live on social media the moment before the slaughter. A shaky mobile phone camera shot revealed an empty cellblock waiting for the killers to arrive. The video showed a person begging the police to rescue him. No action was taken on the part of government for seven hours, and the police stayed put outside the carceral complex until the mass killing ended. While they waited outside, twenty more inmates were murdered.

A Debordian critique of spectacle is a rather predictable approach to think of these ultraviolent images (Debord 2010). They are aimed at capturing attention and manipulating affect. The footage surely instills horror and fear, and the images constitute a visual mediation that is experienced by viewers as immediate reality. What the concept of spectacle misses out, however, is what Carlos Alberto Sánchez’ (2020) book, A sense of brutality: philosophy after narco-culture, illuminates: the process by which prisoners are stripped of their identity and become disposable humans.

Sánchez’s philosophy steps into the visual ecology of drug trafficking to interrogate the extreme goriness of cartel massacres in Mexico. He investigates how an excess of violence makes certain acts of killing “too much” to be bearable, and how the breakdown of representational violence gives way to brutality. Brutality is more than violence, according to Sánchez. Its logic is neither instrumental nor universal. A brutal act of killing is more concerned with extermination than domination. Brutality is excessive for the sake of destruction and accumulation. Furthermore, brutality is also paradoxical: it simultaneously overexposes death, yet renders murder invisible in plain sight. What Sánchez calls the “brutality paradox” refers to the creation of killable bodies through the objectivation of human life. Criminals, enemies, or prisoners are not seen as people but as things subjected to destruction. The paradox is that things cannot be brutalized, only humans can. In dehumanizing people brutality dissolves itself, manifesting only in the form of residues and remains.

My essay response engages with Sánchez’s phenomenological exploration of brutality to further examine the relationship between spectacle and surveillance and between image and death. In direct conversation with his theorization of narco-culture, I wish to highlight one of its main contributions, namely a critique of spectacle as insufficient for explaining the ultraviolent images associated with the world of narco and why our scholarly interventions, even the most radical ones, cannot escape the paradox of brutality.

Spectacle and surveillance

In Ecuador, prisoners’ massacre images include short videos and photographs. The videos are unsteady, single-shot scenes. Some video recording shows armed inmates interacting with unseen cameramen, but the bulk of footage is either wide-angle shots of crowd killings or close-ups of heads cut off and severed limbs. The action-driven videos offer a singular point-of-view perspective that places the viewer behind the scenes and creates the illusion of first-hand experience. The photos portray decapitated heads, mutilated bodies, and piles of burnt corpses.

Although the massacre images obey the logic of spectacle, they are also bound up with visual techniques of body-cam policing and the work of police intelligence within Ecuadorian penitentiaries, where allowing an inmate to have a mobile phone is the most frequent recruitment approach for engaging prison informants. One way to put it is to suggest that these images are surveillance disguised as spectacle. In fact, surveillance cameras were out of order during the massacres. Prison authorities said it was due to budget cuts, but human rights lawyers claimed that CCTV cameras were disabled back in 2016 after police officers were caught torturing inmates. In lieu of the state gaze, hundreds of mobile phones owned by inmates were made available to keep optical surveillance in place.

The official narrative has remained somewhat the same from the time of the first massacre. Prison mass killings are framed as violent clashes among prison gangs connected to Mexican narco-organizations. This explanation has also been mobilized to characterize narco-related murders outside prisons, which mimic “the bloodiest tactics of Mexico’s drug war.” The Ecuadorian government has characterized prison massacres as “irrational.” High-ranking authorities and some scholars have used the massacres’ brutal images to illustrate the absence of state power within penitentiaries. In this view, Ecuadorian prisons are imagined in opposition to an abstract idea of the modern state that serves as benchmark for rationality and civilized behavior.

Sánchez points out the dangers of characterizing brutality as irrational or uncivilized. Brutality is neither, he notes. It is rather a constitutive element of a rational system of hyperconsumption that swallows up people into dynamics of excess and annihilation. Moreover, in narco-culture, people turn into the prime object of consumption. In analyzing the ideological roots of the modern notion of consumption, David Graeber (2011) argued that eating food has become a model of social relationality, not so much in the sense of sharing a meal but in the sense of destroying something while making it part of oneself. Seen from this perspective, eating metaphors are less about imagining human interconnectedness than representing the politics of ownership and desire.

I mention Graeber’s critique of consumption because Sánchez conceptualizes brutality by describing a ritualized cartel practice known as making posol, in which a corpse is dismembered and dissolved in acid. Posol is commonly known as the name of a traditional Mexican stew dish prepared by boiling corn dough in water. Pozoleando is the Spanish gerund form of posol and, in narco-culture, it is used in reference to the act of liquifying a human body. Sánchez situates the practice of making posol outside the logic of spectacle. The surplus of violence in this kind of killing is tied to the production of silence and anonymity. The chemical dissolution of people in barrels is not meant to be seen. Rather than horror or terror, posol-making seeks to create inattention to suffering and pain.

The use of traditional dish names as metaphors of murder is common in Latin America. In Colombia, for instance, María Victoria Uribe (2004) documented a macabre handling of dead bodies called tamaleando, in which a corpse was butchered into small pieces to make it look like meat filling a tamal – the well-known corn dough topped with meat and steamed wrapped in banana leaves. This killing practice in Colombia is part of a broader repertoire of extreme violence developed during a period of rampant political upheaval known as La Violencia (the violence), extending from 1946 to 1964, and later revived in the context of the war on drugs from the 1990s to this day. This form of brutality seeks destitution; its purpose is not only the erasure of people, but also the displacement of survivors from their lands.

These eating metaphors are key to understanding what is at stake beyond the spectacle of violence. In Ecuador, images of mutilated and charred corpses have appeared in the aftermath of each prison riot. Decapitating, dismembering, and burning human bodies within penitentiaries have become associated with traditional roasted meat dishes. The assumptions about consumption involved in “grilling” human bodies need to be further examined considering Ecuador’s own history of narco-culture. What we have learned thus far from the videos and photographs of the massacres is that they are more than spectacular representations of extreme violence. They constitute an ecology of visual brutality in which state surveillance has played a prominent role fomenting the violence.

I now turn to the treatment of prison massacre images in Ecuador’s constitutional court to show how the logic of brutality operates within valid and well-intentioned critiques of narco-violence. My point is not to discredit the work of justices, lawyers, and legal scholars but rather to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of too much abstraction in the realm of justice.

Image and death

Two weeks after the first prison massacre on February 23, 2021, a university-based group of human rights lawyers challenged the official narrative of the massacre and petitioned urgent corrective measures on behalf of the entire prison population, bringing the Ecuadorian prison administration to trial before the constitutional court for human rights’ violations and institutional negligence.

Human rights lawyers downloaded the massacre footage from social media and put together an evidence file on carceral torture. In the hearing, lawyers asked the judges to watch the images of death and murder through the lens of constitutional rights. This meant shifting the court’s attention from the atrociousness of the massacre to the slow violence of inadequate confinement. None of the prisoners being executed on screen was named in court; this was partly because many victims were still unidentified and partly because their lives dissolved into the anonymity of extreme visual violence.

Several amici curiae intervened in the trial. Amicus curiae is legal Latin for “friend of the court.” It refers to people who assist judges to better understand a given topic for court deliberation. One of the amicus curiae in support of prisoners made a reference to the videos. In his presentation via Zoom, he suggested the videos spoke for themselves and there was no better evidence of torture and human rights’ violations within Ecuadorian penitentiaries than the images produced by prisoners. Again, the murdered prisoners were never mentioned.

The government’s defense objected to the admission of massacre footage as evidence because a forensic expert report was pending. The motion for dismissal was not included in the ruling but the videos were accepted as evidence for the case. In the end, the court resolved in favor of prisoners. Judges considered that the state had deprived inmates from their constitutional rights and ordered urgent corrective measures to prevent further human rights violations. After this habeas corpus trial, the massacre images travelled to other national and international courts, which also ruled in favor of prisoners. Still, their names or identities were never mentioned.

Sánchez makes a compelling philosophical intervention into the dangers of a critique of violence that falls prey of the brutality paradox – a contradictory double movement of derealization that both recognizes and negates human existence. As Sánchez (2019, 143) put it:

Derealization is the transformation of concrete persons into abstractions, ideas, concepts, classes, “notions of the human,” or some kind of fictionalized subjectivity. Derealized, the person is no longer human but an abstraction or an idea, and their lives do not count as lives; as abstractions, therefore, they cannot feel, bleed, die, and so on. In their abstraction, violence against them is not really violence against persons but violence against derealized unrealities … There is in this a two-step progression to derealization involving the framing of persons in a dehumanizing discourse followed by their marginalization to the realm of the nonhuman or the nonmournable. Fed into this dehumanizing machinery, persons are stripped of name, personality, desire, and so on and become anonymous, faceless – perhaps numbers or statistics but generally unreal. As with the logic of brutality, violence is permitted in the method of derealization because the one being violated is no longer human.

The habeas corpus was a legal victory for the human rights community, and we all celebrated the court’s decision. Yet, as expected, the verdict did not make any reference to the names of inmates killed during the massacres. Their deaths were not a matter of constitutional justice. The role of the court was to decide whether the state was responsible or not for the massacres. The brutality against prisoners, however, manifested itself in the court’s evidentiary handling of the massacre images. For instance, one of the videos accepted as evidence showed a heart in the hands of a faceless laughing prisoner. At the crime scene, the Attorney General office informed the police that such video was not filmed in an Ecuadorian prison. In the process of forensic human identification, criminalistics reported that a mutilated heart was found and was put back in a body missing the organ. An in-situ analysis of the video revealed that the reimplanted heart was significantly smaller than the one from the video. Whether or not prisoners extirpated a heart from an inmate to copycat a particular sort of macabre murder prompted intense off-the-record speculations among police personnel and prosecutors. In court, another amicus curiae invited by the human rights legal team talked about the mutilated heart without mentioning the video and listed every compositional element of the scene – the heart, the hands, the laugh. The video was barely disputed by the government during trial. The identity of the prisoner, even his name, were not a matter of concern for the court.

What critical thinkers may learn from human rights lawyers and the Ecuadorian constitutional court is that we must work around, within, and beyond the brutality paradox as conceptualized by Carlos Alberto Sánchez to avoid participation in the erasure of people living and dying behind bars. Sánchez’s sobering depiction of narco-culture pushes us to think ourselves as part of a moral environment premised on mutual extermination and destruction.

Jorge Núñez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the cofounder of Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, and codirector of the Ecuadorian Prison Observatory 593. He is also the lead designer of the digital platform EthnoData. Among other things, Jorge has conducted collaborative ethnography with prisoners and their families for almost twenty years.

References

Debord, Guy. 2010. The Society of the Spectacle. Reprint. Detroit, Mich: Black & Red [u.a.].

Graeber, David. 2011. “‘Consumption.’” Current Anthropology 52 (4): 489–511. https://doi.org/10.1086/660166.

Sánchez, Carlos Alberto. 2020. A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture. Amherst, MA, United States of America: Amherst College Press.

Uribe, María Victoria. 2004. “Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia.” Public Culture 16 (1): 79–95.